Last night I reviewed a 30-minute Fireside Chat by Dennis Prager filmed on 9/10/2020, and I took notes on it that I wish to respond to.
Dennis talked about how his son taught his grandson that the boy had a dual nature, a very old Jewish and Christian concept of our consciousness being divided up between to ever-contesting, struggling, opposite forces, wills or set of urges.
Prager lays out that the angelic (my word) or good urges part of our nature battles against our bad urges or will, the demonic side (my phrase).
I enjoyed and agreed with Prager’s account that psychopaths only have the bad voice, not the good voice.
He adds that non-psychopaths that are evil suppress the good voice because the conscience is weak and it is easy to ignore and downgrade to personal invisibility, allowing the self to do whatever it wishes to commit.
He brilliantly points out that great damage (collectivized evil in the name of saving humanity to advance one’s ideology) by many people engaging in bad behavior for the sake of serving a putuatively good voice, even though the consequences of their group behavior is catastrophic for society; in short, they do evil from good intentions.
Human Nature must be directed so youngsters learn to be good. Dennis is mistaken as usual in going against self-esteem theory (egoism: I’m okay—you are okay) in favor of a moral stance of anti-self-esteem control of the basic, arrogant, selfish, self-indulgent self as the basis for raising good children (I am not okay—you are not okay).
Dennis’s rejection of self-esteem theory is based in his belief in psychological egoism (each natural sinner is born selfish), and my endorsement of self-esteem theory is grounded in my denouncing psychological altruism (Each group-living natural sinner is born selfless which makes him selfish, violent, and mean.).
It is interesting to me that Prager and Jordan Perterson both reject self-esteem theory, but both are promoters of the Western and American ideal that the individual is sovererign.
The wise Dennis goes on to urge the young not to blame society for their problems but to blame themselves. If you live in Communist, totalitarian China, then you may be more justified for blaming society for your problems than yourselves, but you even there must fix yourself first before you try to fix society.
In America there is very little excuse for blaming society for your problems because you have freedom, wealth, opportunity and law and order here, so you are empowered to make something of yourself.
The insightful Dennis adds that many people hate a free society because their making a mess of their personal lives there makes it nearly impossible to excuse away: they can lie to themselves and others that it is not their fault but is society’s blame, but no one really accepts that flimsy excuse.
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